Sometimes stats don’t lie

Just when it seemed Ernie Els’s age and world-ranking were going to converge at 40 the Big Easy redeemed his season with Top 10s in the last two Majors of the year.

Els, with a T8 in the British Open and a T6 in the US PGA, pulled out of his dive down the rankings to move up from 26 to 24 after the last Major of the first decade of the new millennium.

Top 10s in Majors are not to be sneezed at and the editors of Ernie’s website thought so too as they rushed to put up an article showing that he has a “43 per cent strike rate” in career Top 10 finishes in the Majors having finished in the leading ten on 30 occasions in the 69 Majors he has contested.

The list, which is reproduced below, is impressive but sadly it also serves to show the demise of South Africa’s favourite golfer since his last big one (The Open at Muirfield in 2002) and the disappointment one feels at how much better it could have been.

Els at the Big Four:

Masters

Appearances: 16

Top-10s: 6

1994 (T8th), 2000 (2nd), 2001 (T6th), 2002 (T5th), 2003 (T6th), 2004 (2nd).

US Open

Appearances: 17

Top-10s: 7

1993 (T7th), 1994 (Won), 1996 (T5th), 1997 (Won), 2000 (T2nd), 2004 (T9th), 2005 (T5th).

British Open Championship

Appearances: 19

Top-10s: 12

1992 (T5th), 1993 (T6th), 1996 (T2nd), 1997 (T10th), 2000 (T2nd), 2002 (Won), 2003 (T3rd), 2004 (2nd), 2006 (3rd), 2007 (T4th), 2008 (T7th), 2009 (T8th).

USPGA Championship

Appearances: 17

Top-10s: 5

1995 (T3rd), 2003 (T5th), 2004 (T4th), 2007 (3rd), 2009 (T6th).

Looked at another way the list also could illustrate Els’s failure to close the deal when he has had a chance to add to his victories.

Tiger Woods, by contrast, has won 36 per cent – 14 out of 38 – of his Majors plus he has six other runner-up slots to his credit.

Sadly Els, who sometimes seems to be in denial when you read his thoughts on his website, has fallen foul of a sour putter.

Inspect the various measurable facets of his play and his woes on the greens stick out like a sore thumb.

On the PGA Tour Els has held his own in terms of his stroke average (26th), driving distance (70th) and accuracy (65th), greens in regulation (36th) and money won (44th) but in putting he sits at No148.

On the European Tour, where he is 16th on the money list, he slots in 191st in the putts per round category. The difference in putts per round can be marginal – Woods for instance is 33rd in the States with 28.59 putts per round to Ernie’s number of 29.44, a difference of .85, but that adds up to 3.4 strokes over four rounds and represents the margin between victory and defeat.

At Turnberry Els had a great chance to “post a score” but missed crucial putts to card bogeys at 16 and 18 and also failed to convert an eagle chance at 17 – eventually finishing just three shots out of the tie between Stewart Cink and Tom Watson.

At Hazeltine, to use the parlance of the pros, he “chunked it” over the closing holes in rounds 3 and 4. On the Saturday he three-putted the 14th and bogeyed 16, 17 (three-putt) and 18 and in the final round he bogeyed 15 (a par 5 reached in two and birdied by Woods) and bogeyed 18 to finish seven shots off Y.E. Yang’s winning total and four behind Woods.

There’s a saying in golf that “in the end it’s the putting that gets ‘em” and it is true for Els at the end of a decade that promised so much and delivered too little. He will be 40 on October 17, an ominous anniversary in the life of a professional golfer, when you consider that only 33 of the 411 Majors played over the last 49 years have been won by players in their 40s.

We have recently thrilled to the sight of Tom Watson coming within a two-metre putt of winning The Open at the age of 59 and Kenny Perry, aged 49, went close in the Masters but only five players of 45 or older have won a major. Julius Boros was the oldest at 48 in the 1968 PGA Championship. The others were Jack Nicklaus (1986 Masters) and Old Tom Morris (1867 British Open) at age 46, and Hale Irwin (1990 U.S. Open) and Jerry Barber (1961 PGA) at 45.

Ben Hogan’s halcyon years came after his 40th birthday, but faded quickly, while Mark O’Meara and Vijay Singh are among those who won after reaching the Big 4 but history has shown that Majors are about steely minds, young nerves and steady hands.

Here’s hoping Ernie finds the formula to triumph over what Nicklaus described as “that other game” – putting – because three Majors seem too small a return for his immense talent and the contribution he has made to the game.